I made an error in the use of data yesterday. Sincere apologies to Thunderf00t. And kudos to his fans who finally sussed it out. My post has been revised, with all substantive corrections and additions made clear within the text. The background section is unaffected and unaltered. The sinking ship section revised in key places with a new graph added. The conclusion slightly reworded to reflect that.

Thunderf00t still did 70% of everything I caught him doing. And the remaining 30% he was still manipulating, just not in the way I originally noticed. My conclusions are not greatly affected. But somewhat.

The principal change-of-state is that what I actually showed is that my blog is not a sinking ship. And what Thunderf00t actually showed was our network just returning to level, due to offboarded bloggers last year. When we add new bloggers this year, we may see another swell.

The narrative changes slightly in result. In particular, Thunderf00t saw the highpoints of three years (2012 through 2014) cut in half in 2015. His “falling ship” narrative thus stemmed from that. It’s just that that’s actually just a return to where things were in 2011. We shall see whether we stay level here on out, or catch another swell.

But still no sinking ship.

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